Awesome! That tank shot is at the present location of the Coal Creek 10* curve, right? That starting the pull out of Minturn shot shows at least 3 engines on that train!
I'm going to back up a few decades to 1904, and an L.C. McClure shot of Denver, Northwestern & Pacific #100 on Rollins Pass thru deep snow:
Another big 3400-class mallet pounds the rails near Ft Garland, CO--Otto Perry photo: This big 2-8-8-2 sported 57" drivers and 95,000 pounds of tractive effort, and was built in 1913 for D&RG (no W).
That's Devil's Slide, about a half mile or so down on the east side from the summit. You can still walk the trestles, but only from the west side of the pass. Needles Eye is still closed to all traffic and they won't build a road to connect the two ends of Rollins Pass. Here's what it looks like on Google Earth.
For those who don't know, Devil's Slide is so named for the 700+ foot drop right off the right-of-way. One could only imagine what a derailment here might have meant for the cleanup crews!
Slide Near Needles Eye I seem to remember an account from the 1920s of a slide near Needles Eye where a D&SL locomotive on a plow train was knocked off the rails 700 feet below by the third avalanche to hit it while it sat on the rails. Apparently the first two avalanches were only practice runs. There were a couple of guys in the tender working in the tank when the slide hit. What an awful ride that must have been! I don't know that everyone survived. They had to build a ramp down to the locomotive to fetch it back.
Found while at a friends place tonight! D&SL Mallet #208, being rerailed west of Corona, the summit of Rollins Pass. Burt Fullman photo probably prior to 1920. Neal R Miller collection. Thanks to Neal for letting me scan and post pic!
They likely ran outta water, due to hard running thru deep snow from the Yankee Doodle Lake tank and had to shovel snow into the tanks to keep the engines from running out! There were steam heating pipes in the tender that kept the water fluid during the brutally cold Rollins Pass crossing. This happened a LOT to trains in the first year of Rollins Pass operation in the 1904-5 winter. The tank built at Corona wasn't plumbed with water until the next winter. Often, if a train couldn't get to Corona from Yankee Doodle Lake, they would shovel snow in the tender. The next water stop was Arrowhead, IIRC. I'll have to look that up. There were times when a train was snowbound in a snowshed, that when the engine ran out of coal, the crews had to start chopping down the snowshed to keep the engine hot!
BRRRR!!!! NICE catch! This is one of the lowest snowbanks that I have seen.. Some pics portray snowbanks 20-30-feet high! Those ones are ONLY about 5 feet deep, where the men are standing. It had been taken beyond the timberline, but not very close to Corona, methinks. The last few miles to Corona were the hardest snowfighting the DNW&P/D&SL had to tackle.
He sure is.. I wish I could have met him. He has a very extensive collection in the Denver Public Library. Since you like them 3700's... Otto Perry:
I was just nosing around the Rio Grande forum and found these fabulous photos of the Superpower railroad of the Rockies. Just wanted to let you know that in HO scale at least, a lot of them are alive and well on my Rio Grande Yuba River Sub. Here's a few: M-64 4-8-4 #1711 with an express reefer extra in South Yuba Canyon. That's M-78 4-8-2 #1518 on the upper eastbound track with an empty reefer train. F-81 2-10-2 #1408 heading up Yuba Summit with an eastbound freight. L-105 4-6-6-4 almost at the top of Yuba Pass. A big L-131 at the engine terminal in Deer Creek. If you get Rio Grande steam models, you pretty much have to go brass, but it's worth it. I love these locomotives, and for the most part, they're pretty 'Superpower' on my own model railroad as well. Tom
Hemi: Actually, all of the 1500 Mountains were two-cylinder. Some of them had trailing truck boosters, which upped their starting TE to over 78,000 pounds. But you're right, those boilers were HUMUNGOUS! Rio Grande did have 10 3-cylinder 4-8-2's built by Baldwin, however. They were the 1600 class. Since Alco had the copyright on the Gresley 3-cylinder mechanism, Baldwin built their 3-cylinder locomotives with a duplicate rod/eccentric gear on the engineer's side of the drivers. The 1600's ran mostly in Utah, as I remember, but were classified M-75's. According to what I've read, the 1600's would have all been retired before WWII, because of complications with the 3rd cylinder running gear, had the Rio Grande not gotten caught in a tremenduous power shortage. I've got two of the 1600's on my HO Yuba River Sub. Really nice-running Key imports. It's fascinating to watch their rod action, especially at slow speed. Tom :tb-biggrin:
The 1500's were not 3 cylinders, that was the 1600's. The M78's had a steam operated trailing truck booster which added tractive effort at slow speeds.
I concur, the M-75 1600 series were the 3 cylinders which were scrapped by 1949... 1511-1520 had the boosters, the others in the 1500 series were M-67s Josh
Tom, Did you know that the M-75's were a shortened version of the UP 9000 seriers 4-12-2's? The M-75's have the same diameter boiler as the 9000's and the SP 5021 series 4-10-2's. The M-75's were not very popular at all due to the difficulty in counterbalancing the 3rd engine and rods. They were very hard on the track and why they were used on the Utah Division for the most part. Rob Gardner
I thought the 1500's boilers were the same size as the UP 9000's..... The 96" boiler diameter was the heaviest ever applied to a 4-8-2 type engine. I cannot Google the info I need, as it's found in a Robert LaMassena book. I'll consult it when I get home.
